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Why innocent kids confess to crimes

As Netflix’s Making a Murderer shows, justice is elusive when an unsupported kid comes up against the power of police convinced they’re doing right.

Bradley Albon confessed to murder when he was 16, was convicted and served a full sentence. He now pleads innocence.
Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star (Lucas Oleniuk / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By Mark Bourrie

Sun., Jan. 17, 2016

People like me who are hooked on Netflix’s Making a Murderer wonder if police got an innocent teen to confess to murder. It’s rare, but not unknown. In fact it happened here in one of the most sad, lurid killings in the city’s history.

In the early hours of Sunday, Sept. 16, 1956, police found the body of six-year-old Wayne Mallett near the Dufferin Gates of the CNE. The tiny boy disappeared a few hours before while playing outside his grandmother’s house.

He had been beaten, bitten and smothered.

Earlier that evening, a CNE watchman talked to a puny teenager who wondered: “Do they ever find any bodies in the bushes? What would you do if you found a body in the bushes?”

The guard made a mental note: 14-16 years old, skinny, about 5 feet, grey windbreaker, dark pants, with a beautiful touring bike.

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Five days later, police found Ron Moffatt, 14, hiding in a closet in the basement of his parents’ Parkdale apartment building.

Detectives learned Moffatt skipped school all week after having a fight with his parents. They became convinced they had the right boy. They even played out their scenario on the front page of the Star:

“Police have learned that the boy and Wayne became locked in a struggle in the bushes, the latter getting a grip on the older boy. The suspect is reported to have bitten him twice to loosen Wayne’s hold, then grabbed him by the neck and held him face downward until he died of suffocation.”

There were problems with the police’s case. Moffatt was five inches taller than the boy seen at the CNE. His windbreaker was the wrong colour. He could not ride a bike because of an inner ear defect. Moffatt had been at a local movie theatre with a friend, who was an usher.

But Moffatt confessed to the police and to his mother.

Why?

“Basically, the police wrote the confession,” Moffatt, now a retired school caretaker in Northern Ontario, told me recently. “They played ‘good cop-bad cop’ and beat the confession out of me. They filled in anything that I got wrong.”

Moffatt, alone with determined interrogators and without support from parents or counsel, was willing to admit to anything to get the questioning to stop. He didn’t understand that he risked the gallows.

Once they got the “confession,” the detectives closed the case. Moffatt’s trial was held just over a month after the murder, but it was a formality. The Moffatt family had to sell their furniture to pay for Ron’s lawyer, but no defence counsel could ever undo that confession.

“One of the mean old (jail) guards said ‘You’ll never get out,’” Moffatt told me.

But he did. Peter Woodcock, who murdered two other children in the winter of 1957, was caught and confessed to Wayne Mallette’s murder. Years later, Woodcock assured me he was, indeed, the killer, and was upset that Moffatt had taken “credit” for it. (Woodcock died in custody in 2010.)

After Woodcock testified at Moffatt’s appeal hearing in May 1957, the judge scolded Moffatt for lying to the police and blamed the boy for his misfortune. But the judge added a recommendation that young people who appear to be willing to confess to serious crimes should have counsel or at least support from an adult.

Nearly 30 years later, that advice still wasn’t being followed. Bradley Albon, who confessed to killing Brantford teen Cindy McAuley when they were both 15, now claims his heavy drug use and coercion from a lawyer and police caused him to lie.

Now, Albon and the Innocence Project at Osgoode Hall law school hope to clear his name. It’s going to be tough, with that confession always generating nagging doubts among justice officials and the public.

These two boys, like Brendan Dassey in Making a Murderer, were poor, had no meaningful access to counsel while under intense pressure, and desperately needed advocates. The money saved on lawyers was a false economy. Kids in serious trouble need legal help before the police have the chance to apply the kind of pressure that caused Moffatt to crack.

Although he was in jail for less than a year, Moffatt’s youth was ruined. He spent years in and out of psychiatric hospitals before finding a wife, a job, and a lifelong interest in history.

“To me, it was 100 years ago. I met a psychiatrist who said he couldn’t believe that I was OK. He thought for sure I would live the rest of my life in a psychiatric ward.”

Moffatt’s case is every defence lawyer’s nightmare. Alone, unsupported and up against the power of police who are convinced they are doing right, a kid — even an innocent one — often doesn’t have a chance.

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author and a second-year Common Law student at the University of Ottawa.

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